Jules Verne

Off on a Comet! Jules Verne

One of Jules Verne's strangest and most controversial novels, Off on a Comet tells the story of a small band of people on a tiny world torn from earth by a grazing comet and their struggles to survive in the wilderness of interplantary space. A strange mixture of dream-like fantasy and hard science. The story starts with a comet that touches the Earth in its flight and collects a few small chunks of it. Some forty people of various nations and ages are condemned to a two-year-long journey on the comet. They form a mini-society and coping with the hostile environment of the comet (mostly the cold). The size of the 'comet' is about 2300 kilometers in diameter - far larger than any comet or asteroid that actually exists."